Hi Friends!

It’s me, Karl, with the inaugural, long promised debut issue of SPAM. It’s been almost 15 years that I’ve been collecting your email addresses like Pokémon cards in the hopes to one day bother you incessantly with my thoughts sent to your inbox. Well that day has come!

You’ve subscribed either through Capsule.graphics, kow.fm, or any of a number of other places. Now, it’s just this one place.

SPAM is a newsletter about Code, Culture, Art, & Design. I’ll talk about whatever has attracted my fancy, (or ire) over the last couple of weeks.

Sponsor: Passive Logic

Shout out to my old job for laying me off and a further 10-15% of the company. Including some folks that have been there for 8 years, because they can be more efficient with AI. I’ve lost almost all of my IRL friends.

Design

MD UI by Mass Driver

My favorite type foundry has released a new typeface this week: MD UI. A neo-grotesque in The International Typographic Style. It looks clean, it looks modern, and it comes in 3 cuts optimized for optical size. Check it out: https://mass-driver.com/typefaces/md-ui/

I like the typeface so much that I’ve adopted it for the new rebranded/focused contracting effort I started working on. It works remarkably well, with a lot of personality subtly lathered on. I’m a big fan of the exaggerated inkwells in the XS cut of the Typeface. I’ve also become a bit adventurous and moved to using the smaller sizes, light, thin, regular, instead of the usual CHONK THICK sizes I preferred. It’s not bad.

Art

Kiki’s Delivery Service 4k

Kiki’s Delivery Service received a 4k release a couple of weeks ago. One of my favorite films, Kiki’s Delivery Service is about a young witching leaving her family to strike out on her own. The film is beautiful, and carries a deeper message about creativity, burnout, growing up, and becoming independent.

It’s a film I recommend to EVERYONE engaged in creative work. I would hate to spoil it. My fondest and best memories of watching movies were in my teenage years. I had a small TV in my room and a little XBOX 360. Hollywood Video would allow unlimited movie rentals as long as you brought the movies back within 3 days. It was crazy. I watched so much cool stuff because it was at the store and I could just grab it. Anyways, Kiki’s Delivery service wasn’t one of those films. It came much later after I had been married and started a family. Early marriage years when you’re young are tough. I was trying to figure out how to make it in the world and I wasn’t sure if I even know what I was doing. I didn’t. This film helped me to relax, recharge, become reinspired, and most importantly to learn to deal with things not being the best. What if I’m not good enough? Maybe that’s ok. Being the best that I can be is just as important.

Code

GRAM

Gram is a new code editor forked from Zed without all the AI stuff that Zed has put into their editor. I think it looks pretty swell, the foundation of GRAM on Zed seems pretty solid. Writing applications in Rust seems like a lot of fun and I’m hopeful for where the project goes. Check it out here.

Zed really is a fantastic editor. I’m excited to see where GRAM goes.

I’ve noticed a significant uptick in anti-AI sentiment lately. I guess most people don’t like their computer to sometimes lie to them, or ugly and reductive art to replace the work of real artists. Vitriol aside, the way that LLMs are trained and the resources necessary to run them mean that they just aren’t suitable or moral to use. At least not in their current state. I expect we’ll see ethically trained and energy efficient machine learning algorithms arise in parallel with looming tech crash. One can hope.

Culture

The United States Descends into Failed Imperialism

It’s been a long time coming, a moral reckoning. With the long drawn out protection of pedophiles in positions of power that the trump administration seems to love, they decided to do a war on Iran for fun. The hope is that we all get distracted by the war vibes to ignore the sex trafficking ring. It doesn’t seem to be working.

War is always abhorrent and evil. Only fools would choose this.

With gas prices going up across the world, the global economy is going to feel a large shock, with an almost guaranteed recession. Couple this with the mounting distrust of the United States by NATO allies to either supply arms reliably, or to even support NATO, and you’ll have a recipe for the guaranteed waning of the American Empire. Which is fine. US allies’ don’t trust the US. Hell, I don’t trust the US and I live here. It’s giving strong failed state vibes.

All that is to say what should we be doing? Make friends, talk to your neighbors, build community, savings, security. Focus on your local community and stand for what’s right. Whatever is coming next is gonna be rough. Be ready.

Epilogue

Well that’s it for today. Because I was recently laid off I started looking for more work again. But gratefully I think I already have that figured out and start another full time job soon. I’m not going to pursue freelancing like I did in the past. It was grueling, and disasterful. I should write a book: How to Fail.

I do have another idea that I want to pursue. We’ll see how it goes…

-kow